The Australian government has said it will expand the safe harbour regime under the Copyright Act to the educational, cultural, and disability sectors, including while such organisations use a cloud service provider.

The third reading of the Copyright Amendment (Service Providers) Bill 2017 was agreed to by the Senate on Thursday, but has yet to pass the House of Representatives.

The government had tabled its response to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on Wednesday, noting the "ongoing entrenched and polarised views of stakeholders on safe harbour reform" as a reason for not supporting an extension of safe harbours to all carriage and service providers.

In its response, it rejected the Australian Greens dissenting recommendation that "service provider" be defined as "a provider of transmission, routing, or connections for digital online communications without modification of their content between or among points specified by the user of material of the user's choosing".